China – socialist or an imperialist? the difference

An ideological assault on China is taking place that cannot be fought piecemeal, answering each lie. Of course, it is crucial to refute the lies and propaganda, but it is not persuasive if the reason behind the U.S. ruling class’s extraordinary and pervasive hostility to China is not exposed. We must expose the class differences between People’s China and U.S. imperialism.

China’s emergence is a game-changer on a world scale today, with its Belt and Road Initiative, the Shanghai Cooperation agreement and the BRICS+ meeting this September at the United Nations. China has become a resource, an alternative to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, with their brutal structural adjustment, deregulation and privatization programs (SAPs). China is a lifeline for the Global South. The Africa Summit just held in Beijing confirmed this a thousand times over.

China was able to end poverty for 800 million people — something neither the U.S. nor any other capitalist country has been able to do. Life expectancy is higher today in China than in the United States. China has achieved the fastest growth in living standards of any country in the world.

So U.S. imperialism is doubling down. Candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump agree. The Pentagon agrees. NATO agrees. New sanctions, new tariffs, new rounds of propaganda directed at China are aimed at preparing for war by 2025.

In the Pacific Ocean and South China Sea, U.S. strategists are rushing to construct a military alliance similar to NATO. It will include Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and the Philippines and is directed against China.

Every arm of the imperialist colossus is predicting and planning for this war. The vicious and relentless propaganda, the expanding military budget, the relentless war “games” and military maneuvers and the total agreement of both Democratic and Republican parties testify to the danger.

Which side are you on?

“Which side are you on?” is the oldest formulation in the class struggle.

The group Friends of Socialist China provides a valuable framework to explain the country’s most important contribution. Political movements, parties and organizations of the working class that take sides in the global class struggle are the most valuable anchor to withstand the crisis confronting the working class and all oppressed peoples. Without this anchor, this basic understanding, workers and activists are cast adrift in the onslaught of each imperialist flood.

An important part of understanding the changing world situation can be found in Workers World Party’s evaluation of China’s rapid development. U.S. imperialist strategists see China’s gains as an ominous threat to their domination of the world, and have moved to counter China with a whole new level of aggressive militarism. We say China’s gains hold a liberating potential for humanity.

If we can explain the reason for U.S. imperialism’s hostility and why Washington calls Beijing “the greatest threat,” it can strengthen popular resistance to the U.S. war drive.

Working-class solidarity needed

Here in the imperialist center, basic working-class solidarity means defending every formerly colonized, developing country from continual imperialist efforts to reimpose U.S. domination. The countries of the Global South are attempting to break off from their former dependent, impoverished status. All these countries need solidarity.

Especially in this moment, every possible mobilization is needed for the Palestinians, who are locked in a profound revolutionary struggle with the brutal settler regime of Israel, which was created in 1948 on the land of Palestine in order to defend the imperialist domination of West Asia and North Africa. The ability of Iran, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon — the Axis of Resistance — to resist imperialist destruction is at stake.

Some 40 countries, accounting for one-third of the world’s population, are being strangled by U.S. sanctions for attempting to assert their sovereignty. We oppose these economic strangulation tactics, whether they are used against China, Cuba, Gaza, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen or Zimbabwe.

But we urgently need to take the defense of China to a more serious or a higher level. We need to challenge the attacks in the U.S. corporate media, in social media and in academia that have grown as the Chinese economy has skyrocketed to the most powerful and fastest-growing in the world.

Imperialist “divide and rule” tactics always intend to throw dissention, disagreement and demoralization into our ranks. Keep in mind that confusing the issue is their strategy.

Sharp economic differences between U.S. and China

Voices in all imperialist centers are united in slandering China, calling it an imperialist country, no different than past imperialist looters. Their constantly repeated propaganda attacks can make slanders stick, even in the ranks of anti-imperialists. That’s why it’s important to underline the class differences between People’s China and the U.S.

In a capitalist economy, totally run for the benefit of corporate billionaires, the CEOs and the Board of Directors must base their decisions on maximizing profit — and usually in the shortest term. If they fail, they lose their positions.

In China, whose economy is still developing and is catching up in many areas, the major productive forces are owned collectively, socially. Since decisions are not driven by profit, let alone short-term profit, rational planning is possible.

China’s workers have laid down thousands of miles of super high-speed rail. Nothing like this has happened in the United States. China has gone green and solar and put a half-million electric city buses on their streets. U.S. city buses are still belching out pollution coming from fossil fuels. 

Most of the discretionary U.S. federal budget feeds military costs, much of it going to military corporations and their subcontractors. Why? Because this provides the highest rate of guaranteed profit.

Socialist collective and planned production and investment are as different as night and day.

Planned production is different from boom-and-bust swings in capitalist economies. China has enjoyed steady development, year after year, for 75 years, without the recessions and rock-bottom depressions that have been a feature of every capitalist economy for 400 years. 

A capitalist economy depends on the state apparatus enforcing private ownership of all means of production and all resources. The police, the courts, the largest prison system on the planet and the giant U.S.-commanded NATO military machine act as the enforcers. 

Chinese Revolution shook the world

The Chinese Revolution was a revolutionary upheaval that shook the world. It aroused workers and peasants globally. It achieved victory, because it was led by the Communist Party of China (CPC), which broke with the dominant imperialist powers that had looted China.

The early accomplishments made by what was then a totally impoverished and looted country were enormous, including evicting the imperialist powers from China and opening the road to a new society. China faced enormous impediments in this task. It was full of contradictions and led to fierce debates within the Party.

In an all-out effort to strangle this revolution, the U.S. and its allies walled off China from Western trade and technology during its first 30 years. 

During that time, the CPC reorganized agriculture as well as the basic industries that had survived decades of civil war and Japanese and Western colonial occupation.

Every step forward required a mass mobilization involving the great energy of millions of people. They collectively built basic schools and literacy programs, mass immunization and sanitation, irrigation, dams and infrastructure. They collectivized the land and enthusiastically broke the back of the feudal landlord system.

1978: Reform and opening up – the compromise 

But the world dominated by monopoly capital was also changing fast. The leadership of the CPC became convinced, despite many heroic efforts, that the only way out of total isolation was to make a deal with U.S. and Western imperialism. 

After this decision to turn toward gaining access to Western technology and trade, China focused intensively on its own development and on gaining Western investment. This necessarily opened China’s economy to hostile class elements.  

The effort to gain Western technology, factories, scientific and management know-how became the overriding goal. Western investment of money, machinery, technology and skills flooded into China. Along with this, a capitalist class grew in China.

The compromise included concessions and profits to the capitalist class internationally and distortions of China’s socialist structure. Some observers asked if the CPC could balance the emerging contradictions and maintain the party’s socialist goals.

Many in the West said that the enthusiasm engendered by Western corporations’ heavy investments in China had already succeeded in bringing China back into the capitalist orbit. Judging by their enthusiastic focus on China, big capitalist corporate investors certainly must have assumed that they would be able to overturn China’s socialist base. 

The emergence of a class of Chinese millionaires and billionaires and a stratum that looked to the West and studied in the West was certainly politically disorienting. Many who had been strong supporters of China in the past assumed that the socialist base of the Chinese state was totally lost. 

Both the Western capitalists and the disillusioned supporters of China were wrong.

‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’

The most important aspect of defending China today is recognizing the socialist base of the Chinese economy and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party in building an economy of a new type. This is not a finished product. They explain that they are building “toward socialism” or are in the “primary stage of socialism” and that they are not yet a fully developed socialist country with equality for all. 

This phase of socialist construction is described by the CPC as “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.” It is also described as “market socialism” or “socialism with a market.” China today has a “market” built on socialist pillars. Its central planning remains decisive. 

Step by step, China has opened a controlled capitalist market, while holding on to state ownership of the major industries and banking.

Role of the Communist Party 

China still faces imbalances, insufficiencies and enormous difficulties from past imperialist looting and from U.S. military encirclement and economic sanctions today. The Communist Party of China keeps firm political control over this complex and uneven process. 

The CPC has more than 90 million members. Its cells, elected from the ranks, are in every workplace, neighborhood, school and department. The party organizations are committed to defending socialist property and determined to protect Chinese sovereignty. They are the backbone of its extensive social program.

The CPC considers that while imperialist corporations have exploited and profited from hiring Chinese labor, this was a trade-off, a temporary compromise, to gain access to Western technology and factories and accumulate investment funds.

The key economic role is assigned to the state, a state controlled by the working class. Every major industry, especially banking, remains under state control — a state controlled by a massive communist party. The central banks play a crucial role in subsidizing and developing key industries. 

The role of SOEs

Today in China, hydropower, raw materials, high-speed railroads, airlines, energy, communications and most key areas of the economy continue to be State Owned Enterprises (SOE). These State Owned Enterprises, a very precise category in China’s state planning, have laid the basis for China’s further development over a long period of time. 

The SOEs also enjoy many advantages, particularly in credit lines and interest rates granted by state-owned banks. These banks play a critical role in stimulating technological innovation in all fields, such as robotics, nuclear power, space, etc.

Without the major innovations and key core technologies achieved by SOEs, there would be no economic independence and national security for China. Without their long-term commitment to a large number of social responsibilities, there would be no continuous improvement in people’s lives.

Today hundreds of millions of Chinese urban workers, especially among the youth, are well-informed, well-trained, highly educated, in good health, with access to good jobs and modern housing units that they own outright, and they are using good transport facilities. The goal is to bring these high standards to the rural and least developed areas of China.

Small production, food delivery apps, numerous restaurants and coffee shops, artisan booths and craft facilities in both urban and rural areas are largely in private hands. Much further development in many levels of production is still the long-term goal. 

The majority of the workforce is still employed in a wide mix of small-scale private, co-op and township ownership plans, in the cities and in the countryside. Large-scale development of all the productive forces is far from complete in China.   

Today in the U.S., the center of imperialism, there is no longer a peasant class and virtually everything that we touch, eat and wear, every pill we take, every hospital we visit, every cup of coffee we drink is controlled by giant capitalist monopolies. The cars we drive, the homes and apartments we live in, are mostly mortgaged to the banks. The banks are all privately owned. They limit lending to or they mainly lend to, and the government will only subsidize, the corporations that have the immediate potential to make a high rate of profit. 

Since there is little to no planning, capitalism can’t solve the overarching problems humanity faces on a global scale. Ruthless competition for profit disrupts cooperative work that is needed to solve the enormous environmental and social problems that confront the whole planet. In fact, a higher stage of industrial and technical development in a more complex society actually requires a higher stage of social organization. 

Socialist economies, based on planning and cooperation, are capable of solving many problems. With this in mind, stepping up the defense of China, its revolution and its accomplishments is necessary for the collective future of humanity.